Pull Selected Pages Out of a PDF Into a New File
Name the pages you want and get a fresh document containing exactly those, in the order you asked for.
About the PDF Page Extractor
Enter a list such as 1-3, 7 and a new PDF is created holding only those four pages. The rest of the document is simply not carried across. What is easy to miss is that the pages appear in the order you typed them, not in their original sequence — asking for 9, 2 produces a document with page nine first. That makes this a quick way to reorder a short selection at the same time as extracting it.
Duplicate numbers are ignored, so a repeated page in your list will not appear twice, and an entry outside the document's range prompts a message naming the real page count instead of failing quietly. Extracted pages keep their original text layer, fonts and resolution because they are copied rather than re-rendered. The work happens on your own machine, which is what makes this practical for documents you are not free to circulate.
Key Features
- Order follows your list: Pages arrive in the sequence you typed, so extracting and reordering can happen in a single step.
- Mixed spans and singles: A list can combine continuous ranges and individual pages in any arrangement.
- Duplicates ignored: Repeating a page number does not produce two copies of it in the output.
- Range checking: Numbers beyond the end of the document trigger a message stating the real length rather than an unhelpful failure.
- Original fidelity kept: Pages are copied wholesale, so searchable text, embedded fonts and image quality survive intact.
How to Use the PDF Page Extractor
- Add the PDF containing the pages you need.
- Type the pages, for example 4-6, 12, in the order you want them to appear.
- Extract, and check the reported count matches what you expected.
- Download the new document.
How It Works
pdf-lib opens the source and reports its page count, the list you typed is parsed into numbers with duplicates dropped while preserving the order you gave, and those pages are copied into a newly created document and appended in that same order before it is saved. Nothing is rasterised, so the extracted file is as good as the original and roughly proportional in size to the pages taken. One thing to keep in mind: document-level features such as an outline, form fields or links pointing at pages you did not extract will not carry across meaningfully, since the destinations no longer exist in the new file.
When You Need It
An insurance broker sends a client the two pages of a ninety-page policy that actually set out their cover schedule, rather than the whole booklet that nobody reads. The client gets exactly what they asked for, and the broker avoids circulating internal underwriting appendices bound into the same file. Because the full document holds the client's personal details and other schedules, running it through an online extractor to isolate two pages would put considerably more at risk than it saves. Trainers issuing a single module from a manual and clinicians sharing one section of a protocol extract pages the same way.